内容来源：https://www.wired.com/story/why-chip-packaging-could-decide-the-next-phase-of-the-ai-boom/

内容总结：

英特尔新墨西哥州工厂“起死回生”，先进封装业务成AI时代隐秘增长极

在美国新墨西哥州里奥兰乔市，英特尔一座占地超过200英亩的芯片工厂正经历一场“重生”。其内部的Fab 9厂房曾因公司业务波动于2007年关闭，一度沦为浣熊和獾的栖身之所。然而，随着2024年1月该厂房重新启动，这里已成为英特尔一项悄然快速增长的核心业务——先进芯片封装——的关键生产基地。

这项业务的核心在于将多个小型芯片（芯粒）集成到一块定制化芯片上。在人工智能浪潮驱动各科技巨头纷纷研发专用芯片的当下，英特尔正凭借其封装技术，与全球代工龙头台积电展开竞争。公司高层在近期财报会议中直言，封装业务已成为其代工部门的“重要差异化优势”，并预计相关年收入将“远超10亿美元”，甚至有望在晶圆代工收入显著增长前率先实现收益。

据悉，英特尔正与谷歌、亚马逊等自研芯片但外包部分制造流程的科技巨头进行深入洽谈，以期获得巨额年度订单。若合作达成，将为近年来在移动芯片领域受挫、正凭借美国政府《芯片法案》等支持力图复兴的英特尔注入强劲动力。不过，谷歌与亚马逊方面均拒绝对此置评。

英特尔将公司业务明确划分为两大板块：传统“产品”部门负责设计并销售CPU，而雄心勃勃的“代工”部门则专注于先进半导体制造，封装正是其中的战略重点。公司首席财务官戴夫·津斯纳表示，相信代工部门的封装业务能够实现与公司其他产品线相当的40%毛利率。

然而，挑战依然严峻。行业分析师指出，封装业务的成败关键在于能否获得大客户订单，其难度不亚于维持庞大的晶圆产能。作为积极信号，英特尔除了重启新墨西哥州的工厂外，也确认将在马来西亚槟城扩充芯片组装与测试产能，以应对全球市场对封装解决方案日益增长的需求。

在技术层面，英特尔推出了名为EMIB（嵌入式多芯片互连桥）及其升级版EMIB-T等独特封装方案，旨在以更精密、高效的方式连接芯片内各部分。公司高管强调，在AI时代，“先进封装将比硅片本身更能决定这场AI革命在未来十年如何实现”。

为吸引客户，英特尔一改往日作风，其新墨西哥工厂经理表示，现在客户可以灵活选择仅使用英特尔的封装服务，如同“随时驶入或驶出高速公路”，这种思维转变对英特尔而言是巨大的。

尽管技术准备就绪，但潜在客户可能仍在观望，担忧与英特尔合作会影响其从台积电获得的晶圆分配。英特尔代工业务负责人纳加·钱德拉塞卡兰对此态度审慎，他表示成功的代工厂应让客户来评价产品，而非自行宣扬客户名单。他同时指出，当客户真正到来时，英特尔代工部门的资本支出将出现显著跃升，市场届时自会知晓。

中文翻译：

在新墨西哥州里奥兰乔市，阿尔伯克基以北十六英里处，英特尔的一座芯片工厂坐落于两百多英亩的土地上。该厂区始建于上世纪八十年代，部分建筑建在昔日的草皮农场之上。2007年，因英特尔业务陷入低迷，其关键晶圆厂之一的Fab 9生产线陷入停滞。员工回忆说，当时甚至有浣熊和獾家族在此安家。

到了2024年1月，这座沉寂已久的晶圆厂重新启动。英特尔向该设施投入了数十亿美元，其中包括从美国《芯片法案》中获得的五亿美元资助。如今，Fab 9及其毗邻的Fab 11X已成为英特尔一项低调快速增长业务——先进芯片封装——的关键基础设施。

封装工艺涉及将多个小芯片或微型组件集成到一块定制化芯片上。过去六个月来，英特尔不断释放信号，表明其隶属于晶圆代工部门的先进封装业务正迎来爆发式增长。公司在这方面发力，使其与台积电展开正面竞争——后者的生产规模远超英特尔。但在人工智能驱动各类算力需求、几乎每家大型科技公司都在考虑定制专属芯片的时代，英特尔相信这项业务能帮助其在AI领域分得更大蛋糕。

在一月的季度财报电话会议上，英特尔首席执行官陈立武宣称英特尔的封装技术是相较于竞争对手的"巨大差异化优势"。首席财务官戴维·津斯纳在同一场合表示，公司预计封装业务收入"将在晶圆收入产生显著效益前就已到来"。他透露在过去12至18个月里，已将封装收入预期从数亿美元上调至"远超十亿美元"。

今年三月在摩根士丹利科技、媒体与电信会议上，津斯纳进一步阐述称英特尔的封装业务"颇具讽刺意味地成为当前代工业务中最引人注目的部分"，并补充说公司"即将敲定几笔年收入达数十亿美元的封装业务交易"。

多方消息指出，英特尔正持续与至少两家大型客户就其先进封装服务进行洽谈：谷歌和亚马逊。这两家公司虽自行设计定制芯片，但将部分制造环节外包。若交易达成，对近年来陷入停滞、错失移动芯片机遇、正试图在美国政府部分资助下重整旗鼓的英特尔而言，无疑是重大利好。

谷歌发言人李·弗莱明以不公开讨论供应商关系为由拒绝置评。亚马逊发言人多伦·阿隆森同样不予评论。英特尔表示不对具体客户发表意见。

英特尔先进封装业务的雄心很大程度上取决于能否赢得此类科技巨头的外部客户。自2024年起，公司实质上已分为两大板块：历史悠久的"产品"部门继续为PC制造商和数据中心设计销售高性价比CPU；而雄心勃勃的"代工"部门则专注于先进半导体制造。

英特尔的代工计划及其可产出的先进芯片系统数量，是科技分析师与投资者密切关注的风向标——近年来他们目睹了英特尔频繁更换CEO、晶圆厂建设屡屡启停。津斯纳在摩根士丹利会议上表示，他现在相信英特尔代工封装业务能实现与其他产品线相同的40%毛利率目标。

但这仍是极具挑战的命题。"封装并非简单地说'我每月要处理十万片晶圆'就能实现，"长期从事芯片行业分析、Tirias Research创始人吉姆·麦克格雷格指出，这涉及生产各环节的持续流转，"关键在于英特尔的封装产线能否达成交易。若我们看到其扩大相关业务规模，就说明他们成功了。"

上月，马来西亚总理安瓦尔·易卜拉欣在脸书发帖透露，英特尔正在扩建其1970年代建立的马来西亚芯片制造设施。他表示英特尔代工业务负责人纳加·钱德拉塞卡兰已"概述了启动首阶段扩建的计划"，其中包含先进封装产线。帖文翻译版本写道："我欢迎英特尔决定在今年晚些时候启动该综合设施的运营。"英特尔发言人约翰·希普舍确认，鉴于全球对英特尔代工封装方案需求增长，公司正在槟城扩建芯片组装与测试产能。

封装新纪元

据2025年接管英特尔代工业务、在本次报道中独家接受《连线》采访的钱德拉塞卡兰透露，"先进封装"这一术语在十年前尚未出现。

芯片始终需要晶体管与电容器的某种集成来控制和存储能量。长期以来半导体行业专注于微型化，即缩小芯片元件尺寸。随着2010年代世界对计算机性能要求提高，芯片开始集成更密集的处理单元、高带宽内存及必要连接部件。最终芯片制造商转向系统级封装或堆叠封装方案，通过多层组件堆叠在相同表面积内榨取更多算力与内存，从二维堆叠演进至三维堆叠。

全球领先的半导体制造商台积电开始向客户提供CoWoS（基板上晶圆芯片封装）及后续SoIC（集成芯片系统）等封装技术。其核心卖点是台积电不仅处理芯片制造的前道晶圆环节，还完成后道将所有芯片技术封装集成的工序。

彼时英特尔已将芯片制造领先地位让与台积电，但持续投资封装技术。2017年推出EMIB（嵌入式多芯片互连桥接）技术，其独特之处在于缩小了芯片封装内元件间的实际连接或桥接。2019年推出先进堆叠工艺Foveros。公司下一步封装进展EMIB-T则是更大飞跃。

去年五月发布的EMIB-T技术承诺提升芯片所有组件间的能效与信号完整性。一位了解英特尔封装布局的前员工向《连线》表示，相较于台积电的方案，英特尔的EMIB与EMIB-T旨在提供更"精准"的芯片封装方式。与多数芯片技术进步类似，该技术预计能提升能效、节省空间，并长远为客户节约成本。公司表示EMIB-T将于今年在晶圆厂投产。

不出所料，人工智能成为这些变革的重要催化剂。"正因为AI，先进封装才真正走向前沿，"钱德拉塞卡兰指出，"相较于硅片本身，芯片封装更将在未来十年决定这场AI革命如何实现。"

英特尔开始在新墨西哥州里奥兰乔为EMIB-T量产做准备。该厂区约有2700名员工，较去年减少约200人——陈立武接任CEO后裁减了英特尔人员编制。周边是干旱的荒漠地带。与许多科技基础设施扩建情况类似，当地倡导组织对英特尔的用水量及工厂排放气体表示严重关切（英特尔声称在里奥兰乔厂区实施水循环利用）。

在里奥兰乔Fab 9的简短参观中，外行难以察觉太多细节。这里比英特尔亚利桑那州Fab 52半导体工厂的洁净度稍低，因其空气颗粒去除方式不同，但进入仍需标准无尘室防护措施及密封防尘服。晶圆厂内，发丝厚度的硅晶圆经历贴装、切割与模塑研磨工序。

拥有31年资历的里奥兰乔厂区经理凯蒂·普劳蒂在参观中强调，英特尔先进封装的一大卖点是客户可选择在流程任意环节采用英特尔服务，或随时"驶入驶出高速路"。例如客户可从其他厂商采购晶圆，再到英特尔晶圆厂进行后续工序；或与传统芯片封装的外包半导体组装测试公司合作，同时采用英特尔的先进封装服务。

"这是英特尔前所未有的转变。我们过去从不接收其他客户的晶圆，"普劳蒂说，"这需要巨大的思维转型。"

技术过硬且领先？符合。专为AI优化的芯片封装？符合。满足特定需求的客户灵活性？符合。那么，客户究竟在哪里？

一位要求匿名的前英特尔员工透露，目标封装客户可能因两点顾虑暂未宣布与英特尔合作：或是观望公司能否兑现晶圆厂扩建承诺，或是担心一旦公开使用英特尔封装服务，台积电可能减少对其晶圆供应。该前员工补充道，客户承担的风险并非技术本身，而是更宏观的市场动态。

钱德拉塞卡兰则更为审慎："我们认为应当恪守原则：不讨论客户。成功的代工厂不会宣称'我们已签约这些客户'。我们更希望客户主动评价我们的产品。"

英特尔或许该考虑另一句格言：若客户到来，我们必全力建设——纵使资本开支浩大。钱德拉塞卡兰指出，客户到来的重要标志将是英特尔代工支出显著跃升。"随着签约这些客户，我们必须增加资本支出，"他说，"届时市场自会见证。"

英文来源：

Sixteen miles north of Albuquerque, in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, an Intel chip plant sits on more than 200 acres of land. The site was established in the 1980s, part of it built on top of a sod farm. In 2007, as Intel’s business faltered, operations in one of the key fabs, Fab 9, came to a halt. Employees say families of raccoons and a badger took up residence in the space.
Then, in January 2024, the dormant fab was booted up again. Intel funneled billions into the facility, including $500 million it was granted from the US CHIPS Act. Now, Fab 9 and its neighbor, Fab 11X, are critical infrastructure for one of Intel’s quietly fast-growing businesses: advanced chip packaging.
Packaging involves combining multiple chiplets, or smaller components, onto a single, custom chip. Over the past six months, Intel has been signaling that its advanced packaging business, which operates within the Foundry chip-making arm of the company, is having a growth spurt. The company’s efforts around this have it going head-to-head with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, which far surpasses Intel’s production in terms of scale. But in an era where AI is driving demand for all kinds of computing power, and leading nearly every major tech company to consider making its own custom chips, Intel thinks this effort can help it grab a bigger slice of the AI pie.
During a quarterly earnings call in January, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan claimed that Intel’s packaging is a “very big differentiator” from competitors. Chief financial officer Dave Zinsner said on the same call that the company expects to see revenue from packaging “come in even before we start to see meaningful wafer revenue.” Zinsner said he had revised his packaging revenue projections over the past 12 to 18 months, from hundreds of millions of dollars to “well north of $1 billion.”
Zinsner elaborated on this in March at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom conference, when he called Intel's packaging “ironically, the more interesting part of the Foundry business today,” adding that the company was “close to closing some deals that are in the billions of dollars per year, in terms of revenue on packaging.”
Multiple sources say that Intel has been in ongoing talks with at least two large customers for its advanced packaging services: Google and Amazon, which both make their own custom chips but outsource parts of the fabrication process. These deals would be a boon for beleaguered chipmaker Intel, which is attempting a comeback—partially funded by the US government—after years of stagnation and missing out on mobile chips.
A spokesperson for Google, Lee Fleming, declined to comment, saying that Google doesn’t publicly discuss its supplier relationships. Amazon spokesperson Doron Aronson also declined to comment. Intel said it does not comment on specific customers.
Intel’s ambitions for its advanced packaging business depend largely on whether the company can secure outside customers like these tech giants. Since 2024, the company has effectively been split into two: There’s the long-standing “product” side, where Intel designs and sells cost-efficient CPUs to PC makers and data centers; and the aspirational Foundry side, where Intel makes advanced semiconductors.
Intel’s Foundry plans and the number of advanced chip systems it can yield are closely watched signals among tech analysts and investors, who in recent years have seen Intel cycle through CEOs and start and stop fab buildouts. Zinsner, for one, said at the Morgan Stanley conference that he now believes Intel Foundry’s packaging business can achieve the same 40 percent gross margins that it claims on the rest of its products.
It’s still an extremely challenging proposition. “Packaging is not as easy as saying ‘I want to run 100,000 wafers per month,’” says Jim McGregor, a longtime chip industry analyst and the founder of Tirias Research, referring to a continuous flow of chips in various stages of production. “It really comes down to whether Intel’s [packaging] fabs can make deals. If we see them expanding those operations more, that’s an indicator that they have.”
Last month, Anwar Ibrahim, the prime minister of Malaysia, revealed in a post on Facebook that Intel is expanding its Malaysian chip-making facilities, which were first established back in the 1970s. Ibrahim said the head of Intel’s Foundry, Naga Chandrasekaran, had “outlined plans to commence the first phase” of expansion, which would include advanced packaging.
“I welcome Intel's decision to begin operations for the complex later this year,” a translated version of Ibrahim’s post read. An Intel spokesperson, John Hipsher, confirmed that it’s building out additional chip assembly and test capacity in Penang, “amid rising global demand for Intel Foundry packaging solutions.”
Package Store
According to Chandrasekaran, who took over Intel’s Foundry operations in 2025 and spoke exclusively with WIRED during the reporting of this story, the term “advanced packaging” itself didn’t exist a decade ago.
Chips have always required some sort of integration of transistors and capacitors, which control and store energy. For a long time the semiconductor industry was focused on miniaturization, or, shrinking the size of components on chips. As the world began demanding more from its computers in the 2010s, chips started to get even more dense with processing units, high-bandwidth memory, and all of the necessary connective parts. Eventually, chipmakers started to take a system-in-packages or package-on-package approach, in which multiple components were stacked on top of one another in order to squeeze more power and memory out of the same surface space. 2D stacking gave way to 3D stacking.
TSMC, the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer, began offering packaging technologies like CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) and, later, SoIC (system on integrated chip) to customers. Essentially, the pitch was that TSMC would handle not just the front end of chip-making—the wafer part—but also the back end, where all of the chip tech would be packaged together.
Intel had ceded its chip manufacturing lead to TSMC at this point but continued to invest in packaging. In 2017 it introduced a process called EMIB, or embedded multi-die interconnect bridge, which was unique because it shrunk the actual connections, or bridges, between the components in the chip package. In 2019, it introduced Foveros, an advanced die-stacking process. The company’s next packaging advancement was a bigger leap: EMIB-T.
Announced last May, EMIB-T promises to improve power efficiency and signal integrity between all the components on the chips. One former Intel employee with direct knowledge of the company’s packaging efforts tells WIRED that Intel’s EMIB and EMIB-T are designed to be a more “surgical” way of packaging chips than TSMC’s approach. Like most chip advancements, this is supposed to be more power efficient, save space, and, ideally, save customers money in the long run. The company says EMIB-T will roll out in fabs this year.
Unsurprisingly, AI has been a big catalyst for these changes. “Because of AI, advanced packaging has really come to the forefront,” Chandrasekaran said. “Even more so than the silicon itself, chip packaging is going to transform how this AI revolution comes to fruition over the next decade.”
Intel began readying for mass production of EMIB-T in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. The Rio Rancho facility houses around 2,700 Intel employees, roughly 200 less than it had last year; Tan slashed Intel’s workforce after he took over as CEO. The surrounding land is arid desert. As is the case with a lot of tech infrastructure expansions, local advocacy groups have expressed serious concerns about Intel’s water usage and the fumes the plant is giving off. (Intel claims it recycles water at the Rio Rancho site.)
A short tour inside Rio Rancho’s Fab 9 doesn’t reveal much to the untrained eye. It’s slightly less “clean” than Intel’s Fab 52 semiconductor plant in Arizona, since its method of removing air particles is different there, but the standard clean room precautions and sanitized, zipped-up suits are still required for entry. Inside the fab, hair-thin silicon wafers are mounted, diced, and mold-grinded.
Katie Prouty, the Rio Rancho site plant manager and a 31-year veteran of Intel, emphasizes during a walk-through that one of Intel’s selling points for advanced packaging is that customers can opt to use Intel for any part of the process, or “enter and exit the highway” at any point. A customer can, for example, purchase wafers from one entity, then come to Intel’s fabs for the next step; or contract with an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test company for traditional chip packaging, then use Intel for advanced packaging.
“That’s not something Intel did before. We never took in other customers’ wafers,” Prouty said. “That’s been a huge mindset shift.”
Competent, cutting-edge technology? Check. Chips packaged specifically for AI? Check. Flexibility for customers with certain needs? Check. So, where are all the customers?
One former Intel employee, speaking on background, said that Intel’s target packaging customers may be hesitant to announce partnerships with Intel for a couple reasons. They’re either waiting to see if the company can deliver on its fab expansion promises, or they’re concerned TSMC could potentially allocate fewer wafers to customers once they say they’re using Intel for packaging. It’s not the tech itself they would be taking a risk on, the former employee added; it’s the broader market dynamics.
Chandrasekaran is more circumspect. “I think we want to be very disciplined around the idea of: We don’t talk about our customers. Successful foundries don’t say, ‘We have signed up these customers.’ We want the customers to talk about our product.”
Intel may want to consider adopting another motto: If they come, we will build it—and at great capital expense.The big indicator that the customers have arrived, Chandrasekaran says, will be a notable jump in Intel Foundry’s spending. “As we sign up these customers, we’ll have to increase our capital expenditures,” he says. “And then the street will see it.”